Following the success of the previous international colloquia on Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution at Lancaster in 1996, 1998 and 2000, at Lisbon in 2002, and at S. Miguel in 2004, the next colloquium in the series will be held in Lagos (Algarve), Portugal, in 2007, on the 29 - 30th March.

Anaphora is a central topic in the study of natural language and has long been the object of research in a wide range of disciplines such as theoretical, corpus and computational linguistics, philosophy of language, cognitive science, psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology. On the other hand, the correct interpretation of anaphora has played an increasingly vital role in real-world natural language processing applications including machine translation, automatic abstracting, information extraction and question answering. As a result, the processing of anaphora has become one of the most productive topics of multi- and inter-disciplinary research, and has enjoyed increased interest and attention in recent years.

In this context, the Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution Colloquia (DAARC) have emerged as the major regular forum for presentation and discussion of the best research results in this area. Initiated in 1996 at Lancaster University and taken over in 2002 by the University of Lisbon, the DAARC series established itself as a specialised and competitive forum for the presentation of the latest results on anaphora processing, ranging from theoretical linguistic approaches through psycholinguistic and cognitive work to corpus studies and computational modelling.

The programme of DAARC2007 includes 2 invited talks, by Jos van Berkum and by Ruslan Mitkov and his team, and 40 contributed presentations, which reflect the most recent advances of the work on anaphora, ranging from theoretical linguistic approaches through psycholinguistic and cognitive work to computational modelling of anaphor resolution.

Detailed information on the venue, accommodation and registration can be found at: http://daarc2007.di.fc.ul.pt . February 15, 2007 is the deadline for registration with reduced fees.

This is the colloquium programme:

Day 1, Thursday, March 29

8h30-9h30 Registration and check in

9h30-11h00 Room A

Matteo Negri and Milen Kouylekov (ITC-IRST, Italy) ''Who are we talking about?'' Tracking the referent in a question answering series

Olga Krasavina*, Christian Chiarcos** and Dmitri Zalmanov*** (*Humboldt Univ of Berlin, **Univ Potsdam, Germany; */***Moscow State Univ, Russia) Aspects of topicality in the use of demonstrative expressions in German, English and Russian